Android Wallpaper Review: Digital Hive Live Wallpaper

I'm a huge fan of Honeycomb. I think Google developed something really cool with the TRON-like aesthetic, plus all of the bee-related imagery appeals to me. By default, I use the included hive wallpaper that's built into Honeycomb. Since I stumbled upon the Digital Hive Live Wallpaper, though, I'm not sure if I can ever go back.

Digital Hive Live Wallpaper looks just like the standard hive wallpaper, except now the hexagons hover in the air and sort of pulse up and down. If you touch one of the hexagons, it will respond to your touch and move accordingly. It's totally pointless, but a cool touch nonetheless.

On the wallpaper settings menu, you've got a number of settings to mess with and perfect your digital hive experience. The first setting is line quality, with two settings. If you're on a tablet or a high-end phone, you'll probably want to opt for the high quality. Otherwise, there's the standard quality.

Next are all of the color options. You're able to save three colors of your choosing, and then you can pick one of them to be the color source (the actual color of the shapes on the wallpaper). Choosing a color is easy as can be. All you do is pick the color spectrum you want to be in, then drag the little circle to your preferred shade.

There's also a "battery level" option for the color. If you pick this, your wallpaper will change colors depending on if your battery is full, at 50% (or less), or about to die. If you leave it alone, they'll be green, yellow, and red, respectively, but you can mess with those, too.

There's also options for motion (pulsing and whatnot), enabling touch response, and amplifying motion (which looks great on a tablet's full screen).

Performance-wise, I'd say there might be just the slightest bit of hang when moving from screen to screen, but that might just be my own paranoia about having a live wallpaper slow down my screen swiping. Overall, speed is mostly there, so I'm not sure if it's a combination of the floating shapes and the orientation moving along with each screen, but be aware.

Digital Hive Live Wallpaper goes for 99 cents in the Android Market. If you're as big a fan of the Honeycomb design as I am, it's something I'd definitely check out.